Marketing & Promoting your Products at BOUF

While BOUF works hard every day to drive traffic to your products, we encourage all of our Sellers to work closely with us to help build your sales. Please read the following guide outlining just some of the things we recommend doing to increase sales.

Run a 7 day Sale
Running a flash sale (a sale over a short period of time) is great for building interest quickly by offering your products at an attractive discount (30%-70% off) and giving potential customers a very short timeframe to purchase. You can create flash sales through your seller dashboard area at any time. Keep us informed and we can work together to spread the word.

Social Media
Social marketing is by far the most powerful (and Free!) way of promoting your products at BOUF. Social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Stumble Upon and The Fancy should be harnessed on a daily basis by you to build your community of fans, followers and customers. Just setup your BOUF store, launched a sale or uploaded a new product? Make sure you tell your fans by tweeting about it, post an update on Facebook, write about it in your blog, and create a Pin on Pinterest! Follow BOUF on FacebookInstagram or Twitter here.

Feature in our Seller Interviews
Customers love to understand the story behind the products at BOUF. What inspired your product range? How are they manufactured? How long have you been in business for? These are all questions that build a picture and help the customer engage with you and your products, which is an important factor in the sales process.

With that in mind, we have listed a few example questions below. Please send your answers to us, along with any further information, some high-res images of you, your brand, your workspace and your product range, and any video if you have it, to team@bouf.com and we’ll upload it to our Meet the Seller section of our blog.

• If you were pitching it on Dragons Den, how would you describe your business?
• What inspired you to start your business?
• Can you tell us about the design and manufacturing process involved?
• Are you a Sole trader or do you work in a team? Can you tell us about the people you collaborate with to produce your products?
• What are the main challenges/obstacles in your business?
• Have you needed to raise investment or take out a loan to finance or grow your business?
• What are your best-sellers and why?
• What are your main sales channels and what % do you sell online? Do you ever use trade shows?
• Have you been affected by the recession?
• Where are your customers based, and how would describe your typical customer?
• Could you offer our community an exculsive discount voucher? (Please create this here and let us know what the code is, the value and the expiry date)
• If BOUF could offer you a really useful service, what would it be?
• What words of advice could you offer people wanting to start their own business?

Seasonal MarketingThe key to successful selling is to ensure that your products are correctly targeted at the right customers, at the right time. Christmas decorations will obviously sell very well at Christmas time, to put it bluntly. There are, however, a vast array of seasonal events and micro-events year round that you can use to tailor your range and your promotions to. Some will be large well known events such as Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day, Mothers Day & Halloween. Others, however, will be less celebrated but can be just as good for selling. For example, the Summer months are typically fairly flat for retail trading (which is why you’ll often see Summer Sales happening), but events like Going on Holiday, Camping, Festivals and Back to School can give you inspiration to tailor your ranges and your promotions to.

For example, a Seller who produces soft furnishings that do well at Christmas time, but are lousy in the Summer, may find that by creating an “Essential Festival Survival Hamper” packed with things like blankets, cushions, a sleeping bag and a water bottle or ruc sac (sourced cheaply elsewhere), would give them something they could promote vigorously in the run-up and throughout the summer.

With that in mind, we would like to encourage all Sellers at BOUF to think about how you can tailor and adjust your ranges for the events that happen year round, then tell us what your plan is so that we can collaborate with you to promote this. We have a comprehensive year-round marketing planner, and will schedule your promotions in to this.

Importantly, the press need to know about forthcoming products and offers with plenty of time. Each publication varies, but typically, the glossy magazines will need to receive product suggestions and offers from BOUF up to 6 months in advance in order to be scheduled into their publication in time. This means that you may need to notify us even further in advance in order for us to gather together the information and send it on to our press contacts for you. Obviously, newspapers and blogs work on much shorter lead times, but it is important to use the full weight of the press to help build your business sufficiently.

In the first instance, send your seasonal product and offer suggestions to our merchandising team on team@bouf.com

SEO
Please ensure your product names and descriptions are well written, spell checked, and rich in relevant keywords about your product. Do ensure you setup your Store by uploading logo, banner image and enter a full description about your brand that will feature on your product pages.

Gift Vouchers
In your seller account, you can create Voucher codes which are fantastic at converting people into customers. Sending an email newsletter out to your list? Great, add a Gift Voucher code to encourage people to buy something from you. You can also run a time limited flash sale of all of your products, or just some of them, in your account.

Run a CompetitionCompetitions are great at catching peoples attention. Donate a £50 to £250 prize and we’ll build a competition on your behalf and promote it through our own channels.

Featuring on Home & Category Pages
The homepage is of course the most visited page, but the main category pages also attract vast numbers of visitors each day. Often the category pages (or landing pages) convert visitors into customers better because the visitor will be looking for something specific which is catered to on that landing page. If you would like to feature your products on a specific page of the website, email team@bouf.com